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Family Businesses: Hope of Nicaragua

Family Businesses: Hope of Nicaragua
By Rolando Tellez
The National University of Engineering (UNI), funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), is promoting development in Nicaragua. This effort, supported by other universities and strategic partners, includes the entrepreneurship awareness, training of consultants and teachers to train and build an entrepreneurial culture in family businesses.
The idea is to give entrepreneurs the tools needed to start, grow, and keep their companies successfully. This is a formidable challenge for this segment of the population. In my opinion, training should be an ongoing process, and it may be difficult due to the low level of education among many growers.
Nicaraguan people involved will have to learn other patterns of behavior or habits such as planning, on-time delivery of products or services, controls in terms of results translated into numbers, creativity, and democratic decision-making, follow-up on companies´ sustainability. In other words, this means changing the vision of the family business, making an effort to be more competitive.
Countries like Taiwan have institutions and government grants intended to provide underprivileged entrepreneurs and business people with this type of support and training. In addition, the country’s economic policies give incentives to those that contribute the most to the development of society in general. I hope is that many entrepreneurs in Nicaragua take advantage of this opportunity to gain some knowledge in order to improve the profitability of their productive activities. Four decades ago, the per capita income of the Asian tigers was similar to ours. Nowadays, these nations surpass us many times in regard to our income; this happens because they have been opened to the world, through education.
Today, we need to understand the world from a practical, integrated, and even a realistic perspective. The Taiwanese entrepreneurs and businesspeople are successful in the world because they are punctual, and they handle cutting edge technologies to produce quality products. Finally, they speak the language of international trade, the English language.